The pain was constant after that. At times it would quieten down, like going through the eye of a storm, and I could function properly, walk to the shops, put on a load of washing – but then it would rise in a surge and on bad days I could barely move without crying out.
They said it was whiplash, since sometimes the pain would be isolated in the neck, and that it would be possibly months before it healed. The insurance company arranged for physiotherapy, eventually, which didn’t seem to help at all. Besides, the pain moved: it was in the neck, then the next day it would be my shoulders, then my lower back, even sometimes in my legs. Wherever it was, it was always there, a demon that had possessed me and was subjecting me to a trial that had no apparent end.
I had medical investigations, one after another: scans, therapy, with weeks of waiting in between. Advice on how to manage the pain. Alternative therapies, too. I went to the pain clinic at the hospital though it never really helped much, other than to dull everything with medication – and the ordeal of getting there in the car cancelled all that out. My doctor kept signing me off work until in the end I decided it was easier to resign. By then I’d signed up with a proper claims company to try to get some sort of compensation from one or other of the drivers who had been responsible for ruining my life. They warned me it might take years, and I couldn’t help but wonder what difference would money make anyway. Even money couldn’t take the pain away. But Graham had insisted, and once I’d started the ball rolling I lacked the motivation to stop it again.
Those drivers had ruined my life, completely. Everything that had been normal for me was in that instant thrown up in the air and smashed. I had no job. I couldn’t get out in the garden, which I had always loved so much. I couldn’t sit comfortably in the car, even as a passenger, so I rarely went out of the house. Graham and I had been talking about having kids one day, but how could I even contemplate starting a family?
I thought sometimes that it might have been easier if the accident had just snapped my spinal cord and paralysed me, because then it would have been obvious to everyone. As it was, I looked perfectly normal. Nobody can see pain. They have no frame of reference for pain that’s happening to someone else. They can only see inactivity – which they interpret as laziness. My friends and family, who called round often at first, gradually stopped coming round. They all thought I should just make more of an effort to get over it, that I wasn’t helping myself by staying in bed or on the couch, that I should try a little bit at a time and that it would get better. They thought that staying still was making the problem worse. And meanwhile the pain came in waves which made me miserable, and irritable, and so I snapped at the few people who persevered with me, and eventually they stopped bothering with me too.
The thing that hurt more than any of it, though, was Graham. I was happy with him, but you never know how people are going to deal with problems until you have to face them. We never got married so he never promised all that ‘sickness and health’ shit. It kind of went without saying, I thought, and if the situations had been reversed I would have done everything I could to take care of him. But there you go.
The worst accident he’d ever had was a broken ankle playing rugby, and it had healed well with proper physio afterwards. He thought what had happened to me was the same thing, or maybe that the pain of my accident should, logically, be less than the pain of his, since I hadn’t broken any bones. He got fed up with taking time off work to ferry me to medical appointments that were always inconclusive. Like the others, he couldn’t deal with the way my moods had changed, and when the pain was particularly bad he would go. He would just walk out of the house, take his wallet and his car keys and his mobile phone and go somewhere else, to